WildcatGuy said:
WildcatGuy said:
hotpatrick2004 said:
Easy rock one 0 five one the only place in louisville you can hear manilow and air supply. Doesnt make the ville seem very hip, does it?
If I so choose, I can hear plenty of Manilow, Air Supply, James Taylor, or anybody on Pandora, iHeartRadio, Spotify, etc.
Therein lies the problem for any music-oriented radio station trying to make a splash today.
The traditional broadcast business model is based on scarcity of distribution. That is, there is a limited number of places to get a particular product.
That scarcity no longer exists, and it never will again.
BTW, along that same line, I read recently that the #1 rated television station in most local markets these days is "DVR".
And yet, terrestrial radio listenership isn't that far from where it was 20 years ago.
When I was in radio in 1972, people said that the advent of high quality cassette decks and CR-02 tape would kill radio. My mentors laughed at that, and told me that years before that, people said television would kill radio.
Television didn't kill radio, and neither did cassette decks.
The next thing was CD recorders. Then MP3 players. Then satellite radio. Hey... you remember satellite radio? Siriius and/ or XM was going to kill terrestrial radio.
I notice satellite radio isn't even mentioned in the post above. (How soon we forget, right?)
What has hurt radio really badly is the FCC caved in multiple times to owners and wannabe owners, to both create a glut of additional stations across the dial, and allow a too few companies to own too many radio stations.
So you get a market like Louisville that now has 26 or so radio stations. For the same reason the DVR is now the #1 TV station in some markets because the pie is divided so many ways, the radio market has suffered because the radio pie is divided too many ways.
And with multiple ownership, it's very easy for the bottom 1 or 2 stations in a cluster to become the redheaded stepchildren. It makes sense to spend 80% of your time working on the stations that make 80% of your money. But then you have your "also-rans"- that just don't get the time and attention they need to be what they could be. They want to put a format on it and forget it- let it make money.
I think that's what you have with WESI. And if that's all you have, it probably won't beat Pandora or whatever the player du jour is. But quite possibly it's meeting the owners' expectations, being sold as a value-added to the spot-buy on WMJM, or serving as a flanker for WXMA.